1. Technical Field
The invention relates to data transfer within a communications system, such as a digital television distribution network. More particularly, the invention relates to a technique for mediating data exchange rates among various components of a digital television distribution network by use of a novel n-way demultiplexer.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Agile TV of Menlo Park, Calif. has developed a system that uses an extremely powerful compute engine to perform various tasks, including speech recognition and Web browsing (see U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/679,115, filed on Oct. 4, 2000, and entitled “SYSTEM, METHOD, AND NODE OF A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PLEX COMMUNICATION NETWORK AND NODE THEREOF). Due to the very high computational capabilities of the compute engine, as well as its interconnected bandwidth, a single output processor is capable of outputting a continuous data stream on the order of 2.6 gigabits per second on a single output port. The preferred compute engine may be configured with anywhere from one to sixteen output ports, although a presently preferred configuration includes two output ports.
To place the figure of 2.6 gigabits per second in perspective, this represents 96 standard 6-MHz bandwidth video channels, which is equivalent to 750 to 1000 digital television channels depending on the type of modulation used.
A key challenge created by this large volume of data is to slow the data down to interface the compute engine to a variety of traditional cable head-end equipment, most of which operates at a much lower data rate. Further, the variance in cable television head-end configurations requires a great deal of flexibility in the number of video streams supported per interface.
It would be advantageous to provide a high performance, low cost method of distributing such high data rate output data to a number of different ports.